Paper Hearts (Phan)

203 days

The first 2 weeks of school were a living nightmare. The school work itself was simple enough, but navigating the campus and remembering everyone's name where I sat was worse than having an essay assigned on the first day (which did unfortunately happen). The best class was Zoology, though, because I had the only friends I had made so far in that class. And then to make it better, the class was significantly smaller than the other classrooms I'd visited, so everyone I knew was divided between 3 groups. The only unlucky part was that Dan and Chris were seated on the opposite end of the room as me, but PJ and Cat were both in my group which was a plus. They were pretty good at the subject too, and were willing to fill me in on the summer assignment questions I hadn't received.

"Bringing this up 2 weeks late and assuming you've done the summer reading with the exception of Mr. Lester, who can tell me about what they read?" The professor of the class specifically narrowed her eyes at me, although I'd done nothing wrong. She reminded me of my 5th grade teacher that always yelled at me for not doing my homework, which I always did, and wouldn't believe me when I said it was at home even when my mum emailed her about it multiple times. Forgetting the completed assignments wasn't even my fault; I was just generally really forgetful about stuff like that. PJ was pretty understanding about the whole forgetting thing and agreed to remind me to check for my assignments before I left.

Cat's hand shot up and she answered her question.

"There's the loneliest whale in the world that creates a sound around 15 hertz lower than the average whale, making its sound unable to be heard by others. But in a recent study, they found out that the whale hadn't sounded like that forever, and that it deepened its sound like many other whales have been doing since the 1960's to differentiate their songs from ships."

[all true facts apparently, noice]

The professor nodded approvingly and pointed at PJ, who's eyes widened in fear of being called on.

"Liguori, why does it have a sound at such a low frequency?"

He relaxed for a second before terror seeped into his eyes again when he'd realised he'd be speaking.

"They think it's a hybrid, resulting in an unnatural body, and in turn causing an unnatural sound for it to produce. And then researchers think it separated from its group and is just wandering off, but that's not the point."

The assumed she-devil of a teacher smiled pleasantly at him and turned around. PJ and Cat high fived each other quickly and Dan gave them a thumbs up from across the room.

"Now it's been a theory for a while that whales change their pitch. Why?" She wrote the number 1 on the board with a fading purple marker and turned on her heels to face everyone. Nobody raised their hands, so I saw my chance and decided to wing it like I did with nearly everything I did.

"To find someone that thinks like them."

She nodded slowly, overturning the answer in her head, which didn't make my nerves anymore calm. After a second more, she turned back to the board and wrote down my words in purple.

__________

"Why do you think the article about the loneliest whale was given to you for summer reading?" I asked myself out loud "I don't know, I wasn't here for the summer reading." I found the entire assignment stupid. 38 questions on a lonely whale. I could've answered that many questions about why I still have only 5 friends. [this is a massive mood]

"Because lonely whales are a good discussion topic leading to the varying relationships between different animals, which is the entire first chapter." Dan cleared his throat near my door frame, which scared the living daylights out of me, considering I didn't even know where he'd come from or how long he'd been standing there. I hope he hadn't heard me answer all the previous questions completely wrong because I had no idea what I was doing at all.